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Don Cheadle's "Miles Davis" Project Must Invent A White Co-Star To Be Made

From CIA propaganda to diversity representation, Salon examines some of Hollywoodland's evolution over the past 70 years.

From Salon:

Earlier [last] week, Oscar-nominated
actor Don Cheadle described his decade-long struggle to make a biopic about
jazz legend Miles Davis. He raised about $360,000 via crowdfunding, but only
cleared the final financing hurdle when he wrote in a fictional Rolling Stone
reporter and cast Ewan ("young Obi-Wan”) McGregor in the role. Interviewed at
the Berlin Film Fest, where "Miles Ahead” was screening out of competition,
Cheadle said that
casting a white actor in a leading role was "one of the realities of the
business that we are in,” adding that "there is a lot of apocryphal, not proven
evidence that black films don’t sell overseas.”

Superficially, based on these two descriptions alone, it
would be easy to say that the PC police in Hollywood have won, and the tables
have turned on the racial dynamics in Hollywood. Last century, conspiracy
theorists might mutter, the government was secretly making liberal Hollywood
cast Black actors in (white) films. This century, Black films are being forced
to include white characters, because all-Black castings in films = racist or
something, like The Wiz or
Beyoncé’s Super Bowl
halftime performance of her single, "Formation.” Karma’s a
bitch? Nope. In both cases, there is the interesting role played by the
rest-of-the-planet—the planet peopled by individuals who don’t reflexively
share an American worldview–but the meaningful shift of emphasis isn’t
sociopolitical, but geo-economic...